Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Ben Huset sent me links to pictures from last year's MarsCon - to me know what I'm getting into next weekend - and I found this . .

Somehow I find that I have now slipped into an alternate future, one where it takes the combined resources of our world's industrial nations and ten years to build but one space station... and its crew will only be 6, not 250.

20 years ago, 25 years ago, there were people who would say, "If we can send a man - to - the - Moon, why can't we" [insert favorite cause here]? Those people no longer say that; they have gotten their way. Not that we have solved any of the problems - of - the - world, but 'at least' we no longer have the technology to send anyone beyond low Earth orbit.

I do not like this future.

Yes, I will beat the drum for our tiny 6-person space station, but it isn't enough. Yes, I enjoy a ripping tale presented with the latest digital effects ...a brief escape into fantasy... but that isn't enough either. I want Mars Direct, hollowed-out asteroids, solar power satellites & L5 settlements. I want to battle the industrialists for the right to keep the far side of the moon as a quiet refuge for radio astronomy. I want to join the debate over whether we will terraform Mars -- even though I don't know yet if I will be a 'red' or a 'green'. I'll work to get others to see what I see, and want it as much as I do.

And someday, when 'they' aren't watching, I just might slip back into my future.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Spent the weekend and learned a fair bit about postscript. The idea is to automagicaly take input from a php form (like this), slap it into postscript and fire back a PDF via email.

I knew - but never thought about it much - that PostScript is a language. It's a complex language, part of my learning curve was thinking the thing was on a level with shell script when it's really a complex and powerful language. You can DO stuff with PostScript - my hat is off to PostScript hackers everywhere.

However part of this was a wash - I ran slap bank out of time to turn the Offering document into a valid postscript file AND to gin up a script to slap in the variables. So this offering is going to be semi-automated, and hence a bit slower to return the documents than we'd like.

However the next offering promises to be automated - right up until the paperwork comes back to us wherein it devolves into a messy trail of paper again.

Friday, February 24, 2006

We're going to Marscon next weekend.I am so going to enjoy this. Get out of the house - great. Take my woman and boys along for the trip? This is going to be so cool. I'm giddy, I say, giddy. And better - it's a work trip.

I just got a letter from a nice woman who told me the man I sat next to on the flight from Auckland to Goldcoast Australia reported me to the Australian Government because of the book I was reading.

" ... The person who sat next to you on the flight from New Zealand does not agree with your politics or choice of reading and so nominated you as a possible threat. As they were too cowardly or stupid to leave their details I can’t call them to discuss their idiocy with them.”

Please tell your government and everyone in your office to go fuck themselves. Tell them twice. If your boss is looking for something to do, you can tell him I suggest he go fuck himself. Baghdad's safer than my hometown and your PM is a sissy. You have a nice night.”

I really don’t take kindly to that kind of shit. I like it though. Love it. Confrontation. Tension. Adversarial relationships. More please. It’s the only time it gets real.

Sometimes you've got to spit on your hands and haul up the 'Don't Tread On Me' flag.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

During the early years of spaceflight only nation states had the resources to develop and fly spacecraft. Both the U.S. space program and Soviet space program were operated using mainly military pilots as astronauts. During this period, no commercial space launches were available to private operators, and no private organization was able to offer space launches.

Cool beans. Go forth and contribute if you know what you are talking about in that area.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Does the firm have any ideas on how to avoid tremendous death and destruction if this immensely long cable were to fall to the Earth, possibly hitting certain areas twice as badly if it were long enough to wrap more than once around?

Yes. They're going to deploy a massive cushion [wikipedia.org] around the Earth, consisting of a total of about 5000 trillion metric tons of gas. Roughly 78% will be nitrogen, and 21% will be oxygen.

If the cable breaks, the lower half will encounter this cushion at extremely high velocities, ripping it apart and causing it to flutter harmlessly to the ground.

No news about whether or not they'll patent the idea.

The guy who patented one-click shopping is a picker compared to the audacious fellow who patents ballistic reentry.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

My MOS school (4066) at MCDEC Quantico had several instructors from the Navy and Air Force. Good guys. The Air Force Tech Sergeant was a fine speciman of physical fitness, but he generally would not do PT with the troops in the morning. Why? "It's optional in the Air Force".

Fine. But I had no idea that firearms training was not just optional but not available until I read this from the Chair Force Engineer;

During a recent meeting, I had to pose the question why Air ForceResearch Lab doesn't offer firearms training for its officers. (I thinkI phrased it "We're in the freaking Air Force. Why don't we get toshoot shit?") The people in the meeting didn't seem to appreciate mygripe; they were of the mindset that engineers don't get to shoot shit(at least not on the Air Force dime) and shouldn't have a desire toshoot shit.

Good question. Yes, they don't have to 'shoot things' but in theory my MOS in the Marines had little to do with shooting things and I got spend many many hours on the range shooting not just the M-16 but a few belts from an M-60 and a few memorable live rounds from an AT-4. It's fun and educational.

Note the belt draped over shoulder - a sure way to spoil the feed. Lack of an assistant gunner to carry more ammunition and a spare barrel. And she's in for a nasty burn if hot brass drops on her shoulders ...

Attention, Cries of the Heart Ministry at 5 Main Street Mxxxxx, Wisconsin.

Your paster - Jimmy Barham - was gracious enough to plow the sidewalk of the mall building my wife's store shares with your church. However he also pushed a metric ton of snow into one of two retail parking stalls on the street, which is inconvenient to customers.

Today, after your church service, y'all locked the mall door in the rear of the building. You know, the one that customers using the main parking lot use. We wondered why it was so quiet today.

Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, three times ...

Update: I'm sorry if I upset anyone at the Ministry. The stall was not blocked, but access to the sidewalk was. I've changed the title as well. These people do a wonderful ministry helping other people. I'm certain the back door was locked by accident. These things happen.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

It's hard to say where this article from 'Rolling Stone' goes wrong. Well, no. The second sentence gives you a clue that Benjamin Wallace-Wells either has a terrible editor or has no idea what he is talking about.

The spaceship that will launch six astronauts to Mars is a single, spare room just fifteen feet wide. Known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle ...

Sounds horrible. Except the CEV is destined to lift missions to orbit for exploration on the Moon. One imagines he was shown CEV as an example of how they'd lift crew to the vehicle that will take them to Mars and he just wasn't paying attention.

The simulators for the space station and shuttle are the same ones the astronauts used twenty years ago, full-size mock-ups that look -- with all their curved white parts -- like something Darth Vader would walk through. The instrument panels resemble those on a small plane, only with more screens. And when the astronauts practice weightlessness, they do it, wearing space suits, in what is basically a twenty-foot-deep swimming pool.

It is possible that the simulators for Shuttle and ISS are the same because the vehicles have not changed in gross detail. I do know that NASA ordered an anti-gravity machine to simulate weightlessness but it was canceled by a penny-pinching Clinton administration.

If one gear freezes or the navigation system slides off course, the astronauts could end up stranded on a planet 35 million miles from home.

Unless they have backups. And backups for the backups. Perhaps they are just going to wing it like a guy determined to see how far he can drive while the gas gauge reads 'E'.

And if there is any interstellar sex, or even an unrequited crush, the situation could spiral out of control. This point was underlined last year, when a male cosmonaut on the space station tried to kiss a female Canadian colleague. She, quite literally, ran the other way. Mission Control had to remotely lock the door to the Canadian's quarters so the Russian couldn't get in, and wait for everyone's tempers to cool.

Oh my - sexual titillation for the RS reader. Who will have no way of knowing the story is (tip to James Oberg) bogus. Or indeed that the entire article is bogus from tip to tail.

Krep. Krep from the first sentence to the end. Why in the name of Mike, Ned and all that is holy is RS slagging on NASA - the one agency in the federal government that does good, and puts more back into the economy than it consumes? What next, RS, going to write a slag-fest on Mother Teresa?

Greg Boyington was not the kind of man you would want your daughter marrying. Hell raiser, rake, bum - he fit all of those tags and more.

And so? I'd rather buy Colonel Boyington a beer in a dive than sit in the finest establishment and listen to people who earnestly and with an utter failure to understand their own culture spout drivel as quoted in the minutes of their meeting;

Jill Edwards said she "didn't believe a member of the Marine Corps was an example of the sort of person UW wanted to produce."

Jill. Sweetie pants. The Marine Corps doesn't need UW. But UW could do with just a smidge of the sense of history your average Marine is steeped in.

The point of this article is neither to mock Mr Banks nor to praise Dr Kabamba. Both have their virtues and flaws, and your correspondent cannot reliably judge which is the happier. But here are two concluding observations. First, if poor Americans were to compare their standard of living with what is normal elsewhere in the world, let alone in Congo, they would see they have little cause for discontent. Then again, were Americans not so incurably discontented with their lot, their great country would not be half as dynamic as it is.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Or not. Back in January Travis blogged a New York Times article about one Ms. DeCambra, 38, taking solace in having the gun that murdered her son destroyed.

Maybe instead of trying to “get closure” through destroying inanimateobjects, this clan should improve their lot in life by welding theirzippers shut and not having sex at the age of 13 (and, conversely, nothaving sex with 13 year olds).

A month later Ms. DeCambra found the blog and objected to being judged.

Some people have the benefit of not being born into a dysfunctionalfamily, I did not have that luxury, so I did the best I could as childmyself. But, that does not make the death of my son any less importantor painful. Until you walk in my shoes, you do not have the right tojudge, only God does. And He will.

And it all went downhill - or uphill if you enjoy this sort of thing - after that.

Accusations of pedophilia

I would like to know how you are so perfect in a religon the thepriests molest little unsuspecting boys! I would be proud of that! areyou really a virgin or have you been playing with the boys to? Maybethats why you know so much about it!!!!

Snarky counters

No, there’s no child raping going on in the Corcoran family. In thecontext of this discussion, that seems to be a DeCambra specialty.

And the best friend puts in an appearance

Well I am miss Decambra's best friend. What right do you have to sit and bash people who you don't know. You might be a good person and so is she but you have ventured into something that was never asked upon you, so why the opinion, I guess their like assholes everyone has one you apparently have two in any case.

Sounds like your average white trash bitch fest, jazzed up with learned commentary from the smart guy down the block.

From Bro. Bartleby on Crooked Timber. Cheney had to make a phone call ...

Dick: Now what?Teddy: You have 24 hours to come up with something, a minute over and then ‘you’ set precedence and you’ll be free game.Dick: Thanks Ted, and thank god I didn’t have to swim out of this mess.Teddy: Tell me about it. Well, the clock is ticking … and by the way, did you know that the insurance covered the water damage to that 67 Oldsmobile Delta 88.Dick: A Delta 88!? You know what that would be worth today!Teddy: Tell me about it … my loss.

You know how work is ... there you are just doing what you always do .. ho-hum just another day. Liftport for me is a second job that pays-not-so-well and the day job is sometimes .. just a job. Then you get home and read your email.

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 13, 2006--LiftPort Group, the space elevator companies, today announced that it has successfully completed its second round of preliminary tests of its high altitude platform and robotic lifters. The tests, which were conducted under a waiver to use airspace granted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), used prototypes of proprietary technology the company is developing for use in the LiftPort Space Elevator, the company's revolutionary way to ferry cargo into space.

In this phase of testing, conducted earlier this month in Arizona, LiftPort successfully launched an observation and communication platform a full mile in the air and maintained it in a stationery position for more than six hours while robotic lifters climbed up and down a ribbon attached to the platform. The platform, a proprietary system that the company has named "HALE" (High Altitude Long Endurance), was secured in place by an arrangement of high altitude balloons, which were also used to launch it. The robotic lifters measured five feet, six inches and climbed to a height of more than 1500 feet, surpassing its last test record by more than 500 feet.

"We're pleased at the success of this round of testing," said Michael Laine, president of LiftPort. "Testing our technology in real world settings is critical to the ultimate success of our space elevator, and we appreciate the FAA's willingness to work with us on this."

In addition to the LiftPort Space Elevator, the LiftPort HALE system has other near term commercial applications that the company plans to develop and market. These include security, high altitude observation cameras, acting as a relay station for radio, cellular or Internet access during natural disasters, or for real time surveillance over the damaged region.

A revolutionary way to send cargo into space, the LiftPort Space Elevator will consist of a carbon nanotube composite ribbon eventually stretching some 62,000 miles from earth to space. The LiftPort Space Elevator will be anchored to an offshore sea platform near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, and to a small man-made counterweight in space. Mechanical lifters are expected to move up and down the ribbon, carrying such items as people, satellites and solar power systems into space.

Headquartered in Bremerton, Wash., LiftPort Inc. is a privately held company dedicated to the development of the first commercial elevator to space. For more information, or to sign up for a free subscription to the company's newsletter on the LiftPort Space Elevator, visit at the company's web site at www.liftport.com.

Oh ya .. that.

I am biased, ymmv, and it's not stop-the-presses news but is pretty keen.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

The homelessness problem is like the L.A.P.D.’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard. They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.

There are ethical problems with this. It's not fair to hand guys like Murray an apartment while ignoring - say - the guy working two jobs with three kids at home in a dumpy apartment. It is however economical.

Something to like about Phillip Mangano - the leading exponent of power-law theory of homelessness - he wants a solution not an empire

“I am an abolitionist,” he says. “My office in Boston was opposite the monument to the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common, up the street from the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison called for immediate abolition, and around the corner from where Frederick Douglass gave that famous speech at the Tremont Temple. It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.”

Sounds great - sign me up. One problem

Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis. Even the promise of millions of dollars in savings or cleaner air or better police departments cannot entirely compensate for such discomfort.

Dean finds a forum there where they've tumbled on a way to make Garfield funny. Edit out his thought ballons.

This is quite brilliant. The most craptacularly unfunny comic in the world for several years now has been "Garfield."

To be clear, it was funny at one time. During its first year or two. But I've never seen a strip devolve so quickly into such putrescence. Yet someone may have figured out how to make Garfield funny: simply remove all of Garfield's dialogue.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

This is a very good program - Science Friday always is, would that more of NPR be like this!

This week marks the anniversaries of two deadly shuttle accidents: the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster 20 years ago, and the destruction of Columbia in 2003. The shuttle, slated to fly again in May, is due for retirement in 2010.

In this hour of Science Friday, Ira and guests talk about the future. What will the next era of human spaceflight look like? And what roles will government and private industry play in that future?

Here, he casts me in the role of underperforming lugnut: "'Your stories are too long, you ramble too much.' I'd edit you and I'd slice a little bit here and there, and I'd give it back to you. And I'd say, 'Look, I'm not going to spend two hours every day because you can't write well enough. So the next time, get it right!' And if I did that two or three times [without improvement], I'd call you in and I'd say, 'Look I'm sick of talking to you.' And you'd know it too. And that's the way it has to be."

He maintains that a real manager has to be comfortable having such conversation, but too many aren't because of a misguided sensitivity to their underlings' feelings. "That's the cruelest form of management," he continues. "You carry these people along. They get to be 50 years old. You have a recession. You say let's cut costs 10%, and you walk down the hall, 'Holman, you're going home.' 'Why me?' 'Because you weren't very good, Holman.' And Holman's reaction is: 'I've been here 25 years. Why didn't you tell me?'"

However, as has been argued often here and in many other sites, flyingcapsules on Shuttle derived expendables and building a hugely expensiveand seldom launched heavy lifter just isn't going to lower the cost ofspace very much over what it is now. While halting the Shuttle programnow would help to fund a handful of space science missions, it wouldnot help overcome the long term limitations to space exploration anddevelopment caused by the extremely high costs of getting to space.

Dr. Friedman should show more support for the entrepreneurialcommercial systems, and the NASA COTS program that will support them,in hopes that they will come and save the day for space science.

I think it is possible to have VSE - exploration of the moon and beyond - and a program that would lower the cost to space. Damned fool dreamer, that's me.

Mr Chirac said any subject matter that could hurt other people's convictions should be avoided.

I know - it's not nice to hurt other poeple's feelings. It might be worse than cutting off their heads for agit-prop. Waa. Anyway, I thought of this, and what's a blog for if not to share?

ARTHUR: Halt! Hallo! Hallo! GUARD: 'Allo! Who is zis? ARTHUR: It is King Arthur, and these are the Knights of the Round Table. Who's castle is this? GUARD: This is the castle of Our Master Ruiz' de lu la Ramper. ARTHUR: Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail. GUARD: Well, I'll ask him, but I don't think he'll be very keen... Uh, he's already got one, you see? ARTHUR: What? GALAHAD: He says they've already got one! ARTHUR: Are you sure he's got one? GUARD: Oh, yes, it's very nice-a [To Other Guards] I told him we already got one. OTHER GUARDS: [Laughing]

The Knights of the Round table of course are the fools rioting and taking all of this far too seriously and blissfully unaware they are in a comedy and they are the objects of derision and fun. The rest of us are the French soldiers about to fling a giant wood rabbit at them ...

You've got your head down, working away, and you miss things. I had no idea ..

Still, outside of the Dells and a handful of violent outposts near its western Mississippi River border, Wisconsin remained a relatively calm exception to the Midwestern maelstrom surrounding it -- a fact that experts attribute to subtle differences in culture and religion.

"Unlike the ultra-extreme, radical Lutheran sectarians of Iowa and Minnesota, most ethnic Wisconsinites belong to the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod," said Joseph Killian, a Midwestern Studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta. "And if you add in three Super Bowl titles, easier access to beer, and walleye fishing, and you're going to have a much calmer and more stable culture."

All that would change in November with the publication of four cartoons in a Texas office newsletter -- cartoons that today have brought this once happily beer-goggled society to the precipice of all-out culture war.

Monday, February 06, 2006

"We have to do something dramatic to reduce the cost of getting to space," said Mr. Musk in an interview in his cubicle at SpaceX's offices here. "If we can get the cost low, we can extend life to another planet.

"I want to help make humanity a space-faring civilization," he said with disarming — or alarming — candor.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they'd have.

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Who? He built Mittal into the world's biggest steel company. Amassed the third-largest fortune of any man. Currently honchoing a takeover of Arcelor.

A takeover of Arcelor would take Mr. Mittal a long way toward realizing his vision of a dominant global steelmaker in an industry for decades characterized, and brought low, by fragmentation. To pull it off, Mr. Mittal needs to break an Old World taboo against takeovers, hostile or otherwise, involving a company dear to Continental protectionists' heart. That this task falls to a man born in Rajasthan, and raised in Calcutta, is one of the more delicious gifts of globalization.

Update: Note that the article came from space.com, not CNN, who, as Monte notes, probably don't harbor a bias against dead Italian-French scientists. I hereby retract the 'so-called' snark against both CNN and Ker Than. Ker was - and I am amazed, perhaps it was a slow day - nice enough to respond to my feedback at the space.com site.

Thanks Brian,I've made the correction. It should have read two STABLE Lagrange points.

Also, I can see your point about so-called, but that term can also beused to show that something is commonly designated by that name andthat's how I meant it to be read. Still, I'll try to limit my use ofthe term.-Ker